In the internet of completeness in our review of Fable II, we fulfilled …

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Our review of Fable II went live today, but in the interest of completeness, we couldn't well pass up the request that game designer Peter Molyneux issued to the game's critics. Molyneux asked that reviewers let non-gamers have a chance to play and see what they thought of the game, and so I did just that. Note that what follows is merely additional information for those interested and does contain some light spoilers from the early portions of the game. This in no way affected our critique of the game in the front page review, but did prove useful food for thought on gaming today.

To do this test, I recruited my non-gaming roommate Robert Li, who had prior to this never played a game on a video game console before. I set up the experiment as one would any observatory activity: I gave him the controller and got the game running, then sat quietly and watched him play. I offered him absolutely no guidance and did not answer any of his questions, but I told him to think out loud about the game as he played. What follows are my impressions of his playing and some choice quotes that my roommate shared.

Starting at the beginning of the game, Robert quickly selected a male and delved into the world of Albion. He immediately responded to the game's visual design. "I like the pictures." He quickly moved into the first cinema, offering no emotion for the game's comical intro, before getting to a point early in the first cinema where a button queue pops up to focus the action. He fuddled around with the controller, and the moment (and ability to press the button) had passed by the time he'd found the right button to press.

This wasn't the only time the game's helpful hints failed Robert. Other iconic representations of controller buttons left him scratching his head: "Where's 'plus?'" he questioned me when the game asked him to press the d-pad. It didn't take much more than two minutes into the opening, unplayable action for him to ask, "Can you skip these sequences?" He continued to mindlessly fiddle with the camera during the unplayable sequence and skip through the opening quest's text until finally control was his.

Moving through town, he initially found himself lost. "Is there a map or something? Where am I supposed to be going?" he asked. "I have no idea where I'm going. This village is too huge. There should really be more tutorials," he said while hammering the skip button through all of the quest text. The golden breadcrumb trail appeared after a moment. "Oh, that's handy. I just follow that. That's the best thing so far," he said frankly. Strangely enough, he proceeded to make the same mistakes I did: he followed the breadcrumb trail blindly, passing by obvious objectives and even treasure without noticing.

As he moved through the town and learned some of the other controls from the tool tips, he began kicking chickens up and down the street—to the point where he unlocked an achievement I'd missed. I laughed and asked why he was kicking the chickens. "It lit up! That's what I thought I was supposed to do," he said trying to excuse his behavior. "I think it's funny."

After confronting the game's first enemy, Robert learned that he had a sword. He quickly began swinging it around and attempting to attack citizens. "Can you kill him? What about him? What about her?" he questioned as he moved around the town swinging wildly.

Somehow, he got back on track and began the first moral quest which had two different endings depending on what he did. Not paying attention to the text or listening to the narration, he began smashing boxes in a shopkeepers house rather than exterminating the bugs within it: the evil decision. The "decision" was made because the boxes glowed red when he was thrown into the house. There was no weighing the moral repercussions of his actions. When I told him what he'd done, he looked blankly at me. "Oh, well, I guess I'm evil then."

Interestingly enough, once the initial part of the game was complete, I moved him forward a little using a saved game I'd prepared after he so passionately insisted on killing townfolk, which thrust him in the midst of combat out in the open with his dog in tow. Here he found the game infinitely more exciting, as he quickly dispatched the majority of people in a small town. He laughed manically as he tore through the innocents. I asked him why he wanted to kill them, and he responded, "I'm a bad dude." The people fought back, though. "They fight back!" he exclaimed as he hammered the X button with a reckless abandon.

After he'd had his fill and was preparing to put down the controller and walk away, I moved forward yet again to show him where I was in the game. I showed him the complexities of the social system, explained that I was maintaining a wife and child while doing jobs around the town for money to buy property. I showed him the ways in which he could evolve his character's skills through examples based on my own decisions. I even explained the way that a character's appearance evolves. I expected his mind to be blown and the controller to be ripped out of my hands a moment later.

But his reaction surprised me. The complexity was too much. Perhaps I'd thrust too much on him at once, but the game does that at times: I felt overwhelmed more than once, and it was clear that my non-gamer test subject felt the same way. "That's way too complex for me. I just like hitting stuff," he said. I told him that he could do just that and not bother with all that. "But then am I not missing out on the majority of the game?" he replied.

I had no answer for him. Fable II is a beast of a title. There's so much to see, do, hear, read, and find that even a seasoned gamer like myself felt overwhelmed at times. And yet, I saw frustration in my non-gaming roommate's eyes as he moved around the town with a guiding hand. He vastly preferred the open action, but the lack of objectives and having to find the direction himself without me guiding him (whether by voice or in a co-op game) in that open action saw him losing interest quickly.

Where does the happy medium lie for the non-gamer? Is Wii Sports the beginning and end of getting non-gamers gaming? These are the questions that Molyneux was hoping to have resolved but unfortunately turn out to be as-yet-unanswered quandaries left for game designers to conquer.